Essay on the Little Albert Experiment PDF

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PSY101

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Little Albert Experiment

While conducting any experiment you must thoroughly plan out how the experiment must go and why the experiment is being done. Most times when psychologist conducted an experiment they are looking for responses in behavior. These responses can be conditional meaning, a learned response to a common neutral (Myers, 2012), or the response can be unconditional meaning, a unlearned, naturally occurring response (Myers, 2012). In 1920 a psychologist by the name J.B Watson conducting an experiment called “ the little Albert experiment”. Till this day there i still much controversy surrounding this experiment, the main reason far this is due to the performance of the experiment in regards to the ethical code psychologist must follow. When conducting any experiment there is a code of ethics that should be followed which was put together by the American Psychological Association (APA), this code of ethics can be simplified into five parts. The first part in Beneficence and Nonmaleficence, simply this means that psychologist main concern is to keep their subject studies safe and out of harm's way. The second part is Fidelity and Responsibility, simply this says that psychologist have knowledge of what they are doing and also trust and confined in themselves the people they work with. The third part is Integrity, simply this means that psychologist should remain completely honest and truthful during any research or experiment. Fourth is Justice which ensures that all subjects are treated and tested equally, with no unfairness. Lastly is Respect for people’s Rights and Dignity, this simply states that psychologists should treat every test subject like the humans they are with respect. This code of ethics was established in

1953 a couple years after the little Albert experiment (Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx). The little albert experiment was an experiment done on a eight month orphan. The purpose of the experiment was to show how children can have conditional and unconditional responses. The experiment was conducted by placing various items in front of the baby, once the baby was comfortable with those items they will be displayed once again but accompanied with a loud banging noise to stimulate fear. This experiment concluded that the baby did not have any fear to the items unless they were associated with a loud banging noise with made him cry. This experiment was conducted in the 1920’s meaning there was no code of ethics to follow at the time, had this experiment taken place 40 years later I believe it would be unethical. My Reasoning for this is the test subject is an infant of 9 months we have no knowledge that there was consent from a parent or guardian, the baby could have been taken out of an orphanage and straight to the hospital for testing. Another reason this experiment can be noted as unethical is because the test subject may have been harmed, the banging of two metal plates by a baby's ear can dramatically hurt their hearing. The baby was also put at discomfort because of the bangs which made him cry

References

American Psychological Association, American Psychological Association, www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx Cornwell, David, and Sandy Hobbs. “The Strange Saga of Little Albert.” PsycEXTRA Dataset, doi:10.1037/e555342012-002. Myers, David G., and C. Nathan DeWall. Psychology in Modules. Worth Publishers, A Macmillian Education Imprint, 2015....